Roger Ballen’s exhibition The End of the Game, on at the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Rosebank, ends with a short film that lists the animals shot during US president Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 safari in East Africa. The numbers are staggering. More than 500 large animals, including 18 lions, 12 elephants and 106 rhinos were killed. The full count, including smaller mammals, birds, reptiles and invertebrates, exceeds 23,000 specimens collected under the banner of conservation for the Smithsonian Institution.
That contradiction between discovery and destruction is the subject of Nathalia Holt’s brilliant new book, The Beast in the Clouds.
In 1928, Roosevelt’s sons, Kermit and Ted Jr, set off on a lesser-known expedition through the remote highlands of southern China to track and kill one of the last undocumented large mammals known to the West: the giant panda. At the time, almost nothing was known about the animal. Some scientists believed it might be a polar bear relative and expected it to be aggressive.
Both men were under pressure to escape their father’s long shadow. Roosevelt had openly criticised Kermit, who had failed in business and battled alcoholism. Ted’s political career had collapsed after his link to the Teapot Dome bribery scandal. The panda hunt was their attempt to restore their reputations. With funding from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, they embarked on a six-month journey to bring back a specimen of what turned out to be a shy, bamboo-eating bear.
“Not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives would say precisely where the creature lived, what it ate, or how it behaved.... The Roosevelts desired this one animal so acutely that they could barely speak about it with each other, much less anyone else,” Holt writes.
The book follows their arduous expedition through southern China and into Tibetan border regions. Travelling with a team of porters, local guides, and a scientist, the Roosevelts covered difficult terrain in an environment of worsening political instability. They passed through villages controlled by warlords, witnessed a public execution by Kuomintang officials, confronted Tibetan bandits, came face to face with the horrors of opium addiction, and climbed a 4,876m peak in howling winter storms in search of their target.
Their Chinese American interpreter, Jack Young, struggled with local dialects. Zoologist Herbert Stevens delayed progress by constantly stopping to collect plant and animal samples. The team lost mules, faced blizzards, ran low on food and suffered from altitude sickness. Holt makes it clear the expedition was poorly planned and often disorganised. Much of their survival relied on local porters, who hiked ahead to flatten snow and find passable routes through the mountains.
Eventually, they found their target in a bamboo forest. Kermit later called it “a gentleman”. The brothers immediately regretted the killing. “It was only here, at the end, that the brothers realised they had been wrong, and the panda wasn’t the wild, bellicose predator they had expected,” writes Holt. The gentleness of “the panda had permanently altered their sense of purpose — and immediately following the panda hunt they were struck by illness”.
“A dark shadow had fallen across their lives the moment the brothers had simultaneously pulled their triggers,” she writes.
The panda was skinned and shipped to Chicago, where the Field Museum displayed it as a scientific prize. But the expedition marked a shift in public attitudes. Western fascination with the panda grew rapidly. In 1936, New York socialite Ruth Harkness brought the first live panda cub to the US. China, recognising the animal’s symbolic power, banned hunting in 1938 and began using pandas in diplomacy. By the 1970s, they had become global icons of conservation. Today, they remain key to China’s soft power, with panda loans forming part of international agreements.
Holt includes this broader context but keeps the focus on the expedition and its lasting impact on the brothers. Kermit returned to the US, worked for the New York Zoological Society, and advocated for panda protection. He had served with the British Army in World War 1 and re-enlisted during World War 2, first with the British and later with the US Army. By then, he was battling alcoholism, depression and declining health. Unable to cope with military life, he was posted to Fort Richardson in Alaska, where he died by suicide in 1943.
During World War 2, despite serious health issues including heart problems and arthritis that left him needing a cane to walk, Ted insisted on going into battle. He was the only general to land with the first wave of troops on D-Day, arriving at Utah Beach on June 6 1944. His calm leadership under fire earned him great respect. Just over a month later, on July 12, he died of a heart attack in France.
The Beast in the Clouds draws on a wide range of sources, including the brothers’ own expedition account, Trailing the Giant Panda, along with letters, museum records, and contemporary reporting. It’s a clear and unsentimental account of an expedition that helped spark the West’s fascination with the panda, while exposing the cultural misunderstandings and the violence once accepted in the name of science. At less than 300 pages, Holt’s well-researched narrative has enough tension and momentum to make it a genuinely gripping read.
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